Expanding Ecological Wisdom through Social Learning in Planning of Resilient Cities

Contemporary urban settlements are facing increasing development, transformation, and complexity, which has disrupted the ecological system and the human-nature bond, especially in desert cities, and has led to a crisis of the 21st century or a reduction in urban resilience. Many patterns of human-nature communication and solutions inspired by the natural environment support the principles and concepts of resilience and sustainability. To apply human dimensions in planning, it is necessary to extract, transfer and use ecological wisdom, or in other words, ideas based on evidence, principles, and strategies of the human-nature bond manifested in ancient cities, in the structure and function of the urban ecosystem. Therefore, the present study aims to establish a resilient city through ecological wisdom and to investigate the link between ecological wisdom and urban resilience. This paper is a descriptive-analytic study and the data collection tool is a library-documentary method. While deduction and comparison of the structural-functional components of social learning with ecological wisdom, social learning has been inferred as a catalyst ring for ecological wisdom expansion and resilience promotion. The strategic components in ecological wisdom expansion are extracted using the structural-interpretive model. Finally the conceptual model of ecological wisdom expansion in the planning of urban resilience promotion through social learning links is presented. The results of the study indicate that the components of the ability to understand the complexity and capacity to create flexibility, are two strategic factors in the tools of expanding ecological wisdom for urban resilience planning.